


helplessly hoping

by dancer4813



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Everyone Loves Percy, Hurt/Comfort, Mostly Gen, Other, Percy is oblivious, Sort of Spoilers but not really?, Tal'dorei Campaign, Unrequited Pikeval, but he's also a really good friend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 16:36:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13035144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancer4813/pseuds/dancer4813
Summary: When she comes back she feels unsteady. Lost and alone and all too crowded at the same time. People asking if she needs anything, if she’s all right. It’s frustrating, but she would do the same for them, and can’t bring herself to push them away.She finds some semblance of comfort in the dark of night, in a friend whom she wishes could be more.





	helplessly hoping

**Author's Note:**

> In the rush of the semester I hardly realized I hadn't posted any fics of my own here since August. Luckily, the Q&A this past Thursday gave me the inspiration to write this, and I have several other things in the works I hope to be rolling out soon. 
> 
> I'm glad to be back, and I'll see all of you a bit more through December <3

Just after they’d met him, Vex and Pike keep watch together, discussing this new member of their party. How broken he looks, how handsome he looks (once he’s cleaned himself up, of course), how desperate he seems to feel, how reserved he is….

They agree, together, to do what they can to help him. Pike has always had a giving soul, and she’s never been one to leave a stray out on their own. Vex is both intrigued by money, and by the look in his eyes. She hasn’t known Pike long, but admits that she can see him trying to fit himself into a world he doesn’t feel like he belongs in.

She knows all too well how that feels.

Pike does too, remembers hanging back from her family’s schemes and trying to make reparations for everything they did. But she keeps that to herself.

But together they help him – they do what they can. He smiles more, starts laughing. He takes watch with Keyleth and the two of them find their similarities and when the girls next have a night together it’s all of them talking about him: his hair, his turn of phrase, his brokenness, so hidden and yet so recognizable.

The three of them help him grow.

And Pike, in the midst of it all, realizes how much she wants to take him in, to give him her own sort of second chance, more than the one they provided in rescuing him from prison. She’s not sure how she’ll manage it, but she starts spending more time with him, wanting to see that smile, to see him peeking out of his shell. She does her best not to take up too much of his attention – Keyleth is his best friend, after all, and he and Vex connect in their distaste for hand-to-hand combat, spending plenty of time discussing the benefits of long-ranged weapons now that he’s come out of his shell a bit more.

Pike wants him to be happy, and yet… she never finds the time to let him know her feelings. There’s too much going on, and never enough time to tell him.

First there was the whole debacle with Grog and the lich that needed to be dealt with, and then the Drez Vina and the white dragon, and then the Clasp and Brimscythe, then finally rescuing Emperor Tal'dorei and his family from demons resulting in… death, for her.

When she comes back she feels unsteady. Lost and alone and all too crowded at the same time. People asking if she needs anything, if she’s all right. It’s frustrating, but she would do the same for them, and can’t bring herself to push them away.

They restore the Tal’dorei family’s souls to their bodies and spend a few more days in Emon, taking a brief respite from the previous weeks.

It’s their first break in a very long time.

But, without anything else to occupy her, Pike finds her dreams troubled. Visions of claws snapping above her head, the feeling of her muscles spasming as they catch her, breaking her ribs and tearing through her chainmail. Pike hates how small she feels when she wakes up in a cold sweat, heart racing, beating almost out of her chest in its frenzy. She hates that the holy symbol that has brought her so much comfort in the past feels too big for her hands, its well-worn grooves unfamiliar, as if her sense of touch has changed. She hates the white hair that distracts her if not pulled out of the way, and tries to smile when Vex jokes that now she matches Percy.  

The third night after her resurrection she wakes in the middle of the night, a scream stuck in her throat. After breathing heavily into her pillow, trying to muffle the sound to avoid waking Keyleth in the other bed, Pike has the distinct realization that she won’t be getting any more sleep that night.

She quietly makes her way down to the tavern’s common area, only to find Percy awake, the only inhabitant of the inn besides the barkeep who’s not lost to sleep.  

Pike approaches from the front so he can see her, though she’s not sure he does. His eyes are lost in memory, clouded over as she’s seen before, and despite her own anxiety she can’t help but feel drawn to him, her heart reaching out. She’s wary of startling him, but he comes back to himself in a rush, blinking frantically as his eyes clear themselves of their far away expression. Her heart aches fondly, and instead of sitting across from him as she had intended, she gestures for him to scoot over and they end up on the same bench in the semi-private corner of the tavern.

“You should be asleep.”

She looks up at him and struggles to keep her arms at her sides. If only she could so easily chase away the what remained of the emptiness.

“I could say the same to you, you know.”

“Touché,” he murmurs, a pained sort of smile flashing across his face before it flees. “Though you need rest more than I do.”

Pike stares at him for a long moment, taking in his sunken eyes, the tired slope of his shoulders, as if he can’t quite keep up the veneer of authority in his current state. She silently measures it against her own lingering aches and shakes her head, reaching out to place her hand over his on the table, giving him plenty of time to pull away.

He doesn’t.

“I might have died, but you all had the harder task. Going to the temple with me- with my- and the resurrection-”

She cuts herself off, the words stuck in her throat for a horrible moment, choking her off. He places his other hand over hers, and her lungs feel like they are freed from a fetter tied around her chest as she inhales sharply. It’s enough to break the spiral her mind had nearly been forced into.

Taking a deep breath, then a second, Pike nods. Percy leaves his hand over hers in the quiet of the inn until her heart has slowed its frenetic pace and she finds the words to break the silence.

“You don’t have to pretend it wasn’t hard,” she says finally, and he looks up from their hands, meeting her gaze with bright blue, piercing irises that make her heart skip a beat.

“Pretending is all I have.”

Then give yourself a break. You can’t always be unflappable and unmoved. Let yourself… Let yourself feel. Let yourself go, just for a little while.“

"I could say the same to you, you know,” he says, echoing her earlier words, and she feels her cheeks darken.

“Touché,” she echoes, and Percy laughs, running a thumb over her fingers, dwarfed as they are by his own.

They sit in silence together for a long while, Pike trying to sort through the feelings within her, trying to reconcile them with the warmth of his hands around hers.

“I’ve been pretending for almost five years,” he says finally. “I’m not sure I know how to stop.”

A look at him tells her his gaze is focused on the movement of his thumb, the steady back and forth motion, the simple movement so steadying for both of them.

“It’s hard,” she says without thinking, but with that admission she realizes just how much she herself has been tucking away. Her eyes remain dry, but she feels a sob rise in her throat, and it escapes before she can swallow it down. “It’s really hard,” she says, trying to recover herself, pulling her hand away and almost immediately missing the warmth of his skin against hers.

“I can’t deny that. But Pike?”

She looks up at him, even as she considers fleeing back upstairs. “Yes, Percy?”

“Could you do me a favor and take your own advice?”

He holds out a hand, palm up, and Pike can’t bring herself to refuse the invitation. She takes it carefully, and finds herself pulled closer, into Percy’s side as he draws his arms around her.

This time, she’s the one who’s stiff in an embrace. Her face grows hot again and the tears that had been rising up in her since waking break forth.

Tears soak his coat as he holds her, steady against her as Pike lets herself fall apart.

Tomorrow… Tomorrow she’ll get stronger. Tomorrow she’ll be the one to hold him, to start his walls crumbling down, to help him recover.

Today, she’ll let herself be selfish and curl into his arms, solid and comforting as they tighten around her.

**Author's Note:**

> Fine more of my headcanons, thoughts, and fic at [dancerwrites](http://www.dancerwrites.tumblr.com/)


End file.
